(Oakland, CA) The faculty and staff at UC Berkeley are invited to road-test their own AC Transit ‘mini’ pass this semester in a new partnership that transforms their campus photo ID cards into free-fare, show-and-go “Cal Access 64″ bus passes. Users of this pass access AC Transit’s Line 64 buses, which make 15-minute trips linking UC’s Berkeley campus with regional transit connections at the BART Rockridge Station. Line 64 buses, which operate every 15 minutes from 6:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. weekdays, run in clockwise loops serving the entire perimeter of the UC Berkeley campus. This new transit pass program, introduced Monday (Jan. 29) and scheduled to continue through the spring 2001 semester, transforms UC Berkeley’s faculty and staff ID cards (which are similar in appearance to the student ID’s) into “fares” accepted by Line 64 drivers for trips to and from BART. UC administrators and City of Berkeley officials joined AC Transit to create this program that, like the student-oriented UC Class Pass, encourages transit use as the preferred, environmentally-friendly, congestion-fighting alternative to driving alone in commuting to the Berkeley campus. “Our Line 64 buses offer sufficient capacity so that faculty and staff members, just like UC students, can avoid driving in the South Campus area,” said Rick Fernandez, AC Transit’s general manager. “That will be beneficial to the university and its crowded parking lots, to Berkeley’s traffic-choked city streets, and to the East Bay’s transit systems.” This faculty/staff program builds on the popular AC Transit Class Pass, created in 1999 after UC’s 32,000-member student body voted to pay for bus rides in their semester registration fees. The students’ Class Pass converts their photo ID’s to bus passes valid throughout AC Transit’s service network during the entire semester indicated on the sticker students append to the ID cards.